Billy the Kid

            I went to the U of T Bookstore on Tuesday evening before class to buy the rest of the books on the reading list for my Canadian Poetry course. The day before that I’d checked my student account online and saw that it was at zero, so I knew I’d gotten my grant. On Tuesday I checked my bank account and found my refund after the course fees to be about $450.00, so I figured I’d just get all the books and pay with my bank card. I bought Wayde Compton’s “Appearance Bond”; Jeff Derksen’s “The Vestiges”; K. I. Press’s “Types of Canadian Women”; Giovanna Riccio’s “Strong Bread” and Soraya Peerbaye’s “Tell”. I paid $96.28 in total. The most expensive of the books were Peerbaye’s and Compton’s at $20.00 each, but Compton’s was used. I didn’t check what the price was for a new copy, but it comes with a CD, so I guess that’s why it was so dear.

            When I got to the classroom I started reading “Performance Bond”. The title comes from the judicial phrase, “appearance bond”. It’s a US term though because I don’t think individuals can put money down for their own release in the same way in Canada. One needs someone else to post a bond for them here. I did it for my ex girlfriend when she was arrested for shoplifting cough syrup. I think with an appearance bond one actually has to give money to the arresting officers, which I guess one gets back when one appears in court.

            The book is creative and has an original style.

            One puzzling thing is the mention of a Black community in Vancouver. I’ve lived out there twice; the last time for three years. I lived on the street and wandered all over the city but never saw a Black community. The only Black people I ever saw there were visiting from the States like the three guys from Seattle that beat me up.

            George arrived and told us that in this term we would be focusing on how texts and books of poetry are constructed. He told us that he’d brought the topics for our February 28^th essay but that he left them in the photocopy room and so he’d have to go back for them, if they were still there. First though he took roll call and then he gave back papers to students that weren’t there last week. While doing so he found that he hadn’t left the essay topics in the copy room after all because he’d found them between the essays.

            He reminded us again that we have to learn more verbs so we can write better essays. He suggested that we make a list so we don’t repeat ourselves and so we can carry our knowledge forward to other essays. George went to the blackboard and started to make his own list: “The author advises; attests; witnesses; suggests; proves; shows; asks; furnishes; imagines; says; states; demands; is attentive to; bears repeating; conveys; composes an argument; posits; postures; legislates; intimates; hints; insinuates; articulates …” George stopped to react to that one, “Whoa!” then continued with, “postulates; theorizes; elucidates; illustrates; connotes; denotes; contextualizes; corroborates; exposes; reveals; challenges; worries this image; interrogates …” I said, “embroiders”. Then there was “elaborates; sketches; schemes; dreams; muses; problematizes; hypothesizes; speculates; testifies …” George asked if those were enough. I answered, “It feels like enough to me!”

            The whole three-hour class was devoted to Michael Ondaatje’s “The Complete Works of Billy the Kid”. Narrative; focused on a hero, a real life, legendary figure humanized and explored psychologically. The book was written between 1967 and 1970 and covers what was known about William Bonney at that point. The book is not meant to be entirely accurate from a historical perspective, but also uses tropes from cowboy films that Ondaatje had seen, such as those by Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns such as “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”. I pointed out that Peckinpah had actually directed the film, “Pat Garret and Billy the Kid”, and George knew it well. I added, “With Bob Dylan!” and George said, “As Alias!”

            “The Complete Works of Billy the Kid” is a postmodernist work. It has a polyphonous narrative, meaning there are many voices; there are documentary aspects with actual historical comments from witnesses presented in italics. The book is partly about how well we can know anything, and that’s what makes it postmodern. It gestures towards multiplicity in the form of a collage.

            Using outlaws as protagonists in experimental books helps us think outside the box in order to try to understand their psyches. Who is the hero? Was it the killer or the lawman that killed him? The Lincoln County War in New Mexico was going on at the time and Billy was on the wrong side. It was a fight between established ranchers supporting a big store and a collective of smaller upstart ranchers known as the Regulators, which Billy supported. It was also apparently a bit of a religious war because the established ranchers were Irish Catholics while Billy was with the Protestants. The big store, think of it as a kind of Wild West Walmart, had lucrative government contracts, which is the only thing that really made them the good guys. Since Billy was the most high profile member of the group he got blamed for killings done by other members as well as by him. After the Regulators lost the war they went on the run and survived as criminals. When Pat Garret became the sheriff of Lincoln County he went after Billy.

The morality of the story is flexible. The moral is the story itself. Suspend moral judgment to the beauty of the narrative.

Some of the photographs in the book are authentic and some aren’t. On page 31 of the book there is a picture supposedly of Sallie Chisum sitting beside a man in a hat with a long beard who kind of looks like one of members of The Band. It turns out that the photo is of Ondaatje’s friends, Canadian poet Stuart MacKinnon and his wife.

Can you really breed dogs to be insane and feed them on a diet of alcohol? The book pays allegiance to the tall tale. This led George to give an example from recent times of the tall tale that was spun about Sadam Hussein of Iraq having had weapons of mass destruction. In 2003, our prime minister, Jean Chretien said, in his inimitable way, “I have seen the evidence, and there is no evidence!” I can’t find that quote. What I found was, “A proof is a proof. What kind of a proof? It’s a proof. A proof is a proof, and when you have a good proof it’s because it is proven.”

How a legend is born. Billy the Kid’s legend is described as a jungle sleep”. We create legends with our imaginations: “Based on a true story, as told to …” There are various possibilities available to poets, such as “The Definitive Portrait of the Young Justin Trudeau: A grizzly bear was chasing him but he saved himself by throwing marijuana at it.”

The difference between the short poems in the book and the longer narrative pieces is like the difference between one painting and a series of sketches.

“The Complete Works of Billy the Kid” is a narrative lyric suite. Ondaatje wants to blur the lines between genres. It’s like a scrapbook. It’s an epyllian, or mini-epic. Imagine the lyric moments as still photos of one character and the narrative as a smart phone video of several characters.

I said that I like the poems about flowers because they read like poems that Ondaatje wrote from his own experience. George challenged me on that. I argued that poems in the book that don’t try to fit with the contrived history of Billy the Kid are better poems, with more authenticity and honesty.

George says that Ondaatje’s text is interested in the blur. A picture of something in motion will be a blur. Shooting stops the blur. Facts aren’t everything. Ondaatje worries the authentic. The subtitle of the book is “Left Handed Poems” because both Billy the Kid and Michael Ondaatje are southpaws. In the Penguin edition that George has they left out the subtitle. The very first image in the book is a blank box to indicate a yet to develop photo. Development progresses slowly until the very end when the final image is one of Michael Ondaatje as a boy in Sri Lanka, posing happily in his cowboy costume with two toy six shooters drawn for the camera as he plays at being Billy the Kid.  Full circle. This was Ondaatje’s second book, after “Dainty Monsters”, or his third book, if you include his critical book about Leonard Cohen, which was his master’s thesis.

We were at the halfway point of the class, so George called a fifteen-minute break. I told him about my cousin, John Stadig, about whom a book called “Alcatraz Eel”, was written and about whom there are many tall tales mixed in with some pretty incredible real stories.

I asked George what the difference is between stream of consciousness writing and freefall writing. He said that stream of consciousness can go anywhere but with freefall one starts wandering in one’s mind freely but once one finds a path or a theme one focuses on that. I offered an analogy to see if I had it right of the difference between wandering in the woods just anywhere from beginning to end and wandering into the woods until one finds a path and then following that. He didn’t seem entirely satisfied with that but said we could go with it.

I also asked about his pronunciation of the Persian poetic form “ghazal”. George had insisted that it’s pronounced, “guzzle” but I heard Banoo Zan pronounce it as “guzzal”. Even though she speaks Persian and he doesn’t, George says she’s technically wrong if she pronounces it that way. When I look it up though several native speakers of the word seem to pronounce it differently. I think maybe it’s not like “guzzle” but rather like “gahzzal” but with the emphasis on the “ah” part and the “a” part said very quickly but still there so it doesn’t sound like one is jumping straight from the “z” to the “l”.

Zack showed me that there is an afterword in his edition of “The Complete Works of Billy the Kid” in which Ondaatje describes some experiences in his own life that inspired parts of the book. I didn’t really read it. I looked at it for a polite amount of time then handed it back to him, saying, “Cool!” I wasn’t being dishonest because I knew it was cool. I was hoping that the ebook edition that I have on my computer had the same afterword so I could read it when I had more time. It does, and it is cool. It’s interesting that Ondaatje mentions there that the governor of New Mexico in Billy the Kid’s time is the author who wrote “Ben Hur”.

George started the second half telling us that “Sinister” means left handed while “Dexter means right handed”. I wondered if the creator of the character “Dexter” was implying that his hero serial killer is the right side of evil. I just noticed that three more Dexter books have been written since I last was caught up with the series. Maybe I’ll read them in the summer if I can get a download.

I noticed that George reads from beautiful cursive script in a hard cover notebook, so it made me wonder if he digitizes anything.

George urged us to go to Tim Hortons or bars and to eavesdrop on conversations and take notes. He said he’d once heard a man say, “My feet don’t work right. I kicked in too many doors when I was drinking!”

“The Complete Works of Billy the Kid” is un-Canadian but at the same time it follows Leonard Cohen. The narrative is natural, plain spoken, graphic and in slow motion.

Ondaatje was denounced in the House of Commons by John Diefenbaker when the book won the Governor General’s award. I told George that he might be mistaken because I thought for sure that it had been B. P. Nichol’s book on Billy the Kid that was protested by Diefenbaker. Someone behind me did a search and confirmed that it was Ondaatje’s book that was dissed. But when I searched later I found that both claims are made. It looks like the confusion may come from the fact that both b. p. nichol and Michael Ondaatje won the Governor General’s Award in 1970 but it wasn’t nichol’s Billy book that won but rather a different book of his poetry. I wonder though if Diefenbaker actually got the two Billy books mixed up, since the nichol book could be considered more obscene than the Ondaatje book. George assured me though that has read the parliamentary transcripts on the matter.

Ondaatje was young when he wrote the book and he wanted to be approachable.

There is a character in the book named Angela Dickinson. She is not a historical figure from Billy’s world but she rather seems to be based on the film actress of the same name. She did appear in a lot of westerns in the 1950s when westerns were popular. I’ve heard it mentioned that She is a favourite of Ondaatje. I just noticed that she was married to Burt Bacharach for fifteen years. George says she was a B-movie actress, but she was in a lot of major films as well, including “Oceans 11”. She starred in a TV series called “Police Woman”. George said that Dickinson was Hillary Clinton before Hillary Clinton. He said that this bringing of pop culture into poetry is very much like what the TISH poets were doing.

            Inspired by talk about B movies, George told us that one of his fondest memories of growing up in Halifax was the all B movie horror films. He said that their budgets were so miniscule that they would shoot night scenes in the daytime but in thick parts of the woods.

            George made up a Canadian approach to literature: “How to hunt a shark like a bear!”

            The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a distillation of 60s culture. Billy is a beatnik with a gun instead of a guitar. It has easy love, insouciance of youth, freeness, finding one’s voice, psychedelic, fun, raunchy and gunplay with a pen.

            Ondaatje followed this book with “There’s a Trick With a Knife That I’m Learning to do”. Narratives are tricks.

            You will reveal yourself no matter what you write, even when you think you are hiding. Billy has Ondaatje’s strengths and flaws. There is a great tension between being who you want to be over other people’s definitions. Garret accepts Billy as an outlaw. The characters are framed by imposed limitations. Whatever is living unfixed and free is blurred and also dangerous because it can interrupt and invade your space. Invasions are always violent. Verbs turned to nouns like “running” are gerunds. Ondaatje is the poet of “ing”; of the gaudy, the grotesque, the strange and the visceral. George mentioned that there used to be a “strange but true” section in the Toronto Star. He said the rats in Venice are so fat that they can’t maintain their footing and fall down on top of gondolas and tourists. He added that there is now an even larger rat problem in Halifax because of warm winters and condo developments forcing them out of their habitats.

            Ondaatje reminds us of the formula of violation: the road is dangerous and does not run on Disneyland principles. Ondaaatje is sensual.

            George said that the bravura piece of the book is the description of Billy’s torment as he was being transported in chains to prison. I volunteered to read it. George said it is an example of synesthesia, with verbs that are physical and carefully and fearlessly figured out. It is radical and violent to what becomes trapped.

            George suggested that the book may be a reaction to the many assassinations of public figures that took place in the period just before it was published: J.F.K: 1963; Malcolm X: 1965; both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy: 1968. George said everyone was shot in the head.

            B. P. Nichol helped Ondaatje lay out the prose like photos.

            No reputation can do anyone justice.

            George said that the final poem in the book is pure Ondaatje and unrelated to the Billy the Kid story. The author is always a character in every book they write. One needs to think like a psychopath to write about one. Patrick said that Nabokov would disagree. George argued that Nabokov would have had to get into the head of a pedophile to write Lolita.

            George said that the book is the collected works of Michael Ondaatje.

            Somehow Kelly Ann Conway, Donald Trump’s campaign manager came up. Patrick said she’s the only one with any intelligence on Trump’s team. I said that I’d recently seen a video of Conway being interviewed before she was hired by Trump. In the video she tears him apart and talks about what a horrible candidate for president he would be.

            George said the only thing he doesn’t get from Ondaatje’s book was the love scene where Billy leaves bite marks on a woman’s body. That seemed fairly normal to me. I argued that hickies are basically a combination of biting and sucking. George told me he’d take my word for it, but looked at me like I was amusingly weird. Does nobody give hickies anymore?